My mystery tree is a Chinese Flame Tree. Thank you Nikkipolani for helping me identify my tree.
Here’s her comment that she left on my previous post…
Oh yeah, I’ve got one of those. It’s a Chinese Flame Tree. Beautiful little yellow flowers, turns into papery bougainvillea type pods, drops them everywhere, seedlings a few months later in all the places the pods have dropped.
I decided to go back out and take some close-ups of the pods and leaves. Bloggy friends are such a great source of information!! The photo below shows the tree before all the blossoms rained down on my lawn and patio slab.
Have a great Sunday everyone…
Photobucket is holding all my photos that I stored on their site from 2007-2015 hostage replacing them with ugly grey and black boxes and asking for a large ransom to retrieve them. It is a slow process to go through all my posts deleting the ugly boxes.
The Happy Wonderer ~ ellen b. 
Love that first shot of it, Ellen, showing how well your tree has matured.
Glad you found out. It sure is pretty 🙂
I saw your comment on facebook before I came over here to your blog. Now I know.
Ellen: I was going to get back with you as I wondered if what you had is the same tree I SHOWED ON MY BLOG LAST YEAR IN MY YARD. THIS IS MY ALL TIME FAVORITE TREE – THE CHINESE FLAMING RAINTREE! My is much younger and smaller than yours. When I lived in Houson the pods were peachy and I have seen this tree in Israel! I love it!